About 6 years ago a place i worked looked at these and a few other brands. They were using tough books but needed something more. We were looking to buy in a quality that got vendors out in person and let us do the stress test. If i remember correctly the Xplore was throw through a truck cab and into corner of a curb and the only that thing broke was the stylus. we also threw it into a fountain and it worked and the drop from the hood and roof of the truck. This was with a spinning disk and no SSD at the time they also offered a GPS pod. the QA and the accessories was a little lacking. we got a keyboard/dock that had a keyboard with no Q and 2 B's (You can't spell QA without a Q)

I think the issue with selling the old item is getting the clearance to replace a "good part" where it has not triggered an alarm for being bad. I am sure they would have to jump through a lot of hoops to replace parts on a working network if there is not alarm even if there is redundancy in place to not notice you taking something down to replace it. Again you still end up where those S/N get traced back to Verizon when someone calls support on them. My guess is it was easier not to have to fight the red tape to pull the "bad" part and the replacement part had factory seals on it still and was more valuable. However having the bad S/N's still is service will get you when they do go bad and you have to replace something that has been already replaced at that point people started to look deeper.

I had that happen to but I had the protection plan. I had a receiver replaced under that plan and my contract grew 2 years because of that. When to cancel and they said i was still under contract. Talked to a lot of reps and seemed like someone was going to waive that till collections called. At that point the could pound salt. i think we still gwet calles from them over that.

Posted
by
CmdrTacoon Monday January 05, 2009 @10:48AM
from the can't-believe-this-is-news dept.

i4u writes "Rumors about Steve Jobs' health have been flying high again after Apple announced that he will not be holding the keynote at the Macworld 2009. Today Steve Jobs issued a letter with a rather personal update on why he was losing weight in 2008. The reason for losing weight in 2008 is a hormone imbalance that has been reducing proteins. The remedy for this nutritional problem is relatively simple and straightforward according to Jobs.
Steve and his doctors predict that he will have normal weight again by Spring. So stop the rumors and enjoy Macworld 2009."

Posted
by
samzenpuson Wednesday December 17, 2008 @01:39PM
from the free-time dept.

Trigger writes "At our work we were decomissioning six old HP/Compaq servers to clear up space for new servers and, naturally, each server had a fairly large raid array.
Instead of formatting every hard drive (would have taken weeks performing a DoD level wipe) and disposing them all together with the servers, I decided to disassemble the hard drives and recycle them into something neat.
With a lot (a lot) of patience, I made this shiny Xmas tree.
In total there are around 70 old SCSI hard drives, between 9gb and 18gb in size each. They were nice and chunky, oldschool style. There were quite a few different hard drive models, which is good because they each had different bits which I could use. The Xmas tree is made with parts from hard drives only except for one nut which I had to purchase for $0.39." It's good to see that this guy has plenty to do at work.

Posted
by
ScuttleMonkeyon Monday November 10, 2008 @09:29AM
from the kudos-for-owning-up-to-it dept.

narcberry writes "After complaints of one-sided reporting, the Washington Post checked their own articles and agreed. Obama was clearly favored, throughout his campaign, in terms of more favorable articles, less criticism, better page real-estate, more pictures, and total disregard for problems such as his drug use. 'Stories and photos about Obama in the news pages outnumbered those devoted to McCain. Reporters, photographers and editors found the candidacy of Obama, the first African American major-party nominee, more newsworthy and historic. Journalists love the new; McCain, 25 years older than Obama, was already well known and had more scars from his longer career in politics. The number of Obama stories since Nov. 11 was 946, compared with McCain's 786. Both had hard-fought primary campaigns, but Obama's battle with Hillary Rodham Clinton was longer, and the numbers reflect that. McCain clinched the GOP nomination on March 4, three months before Obama won his. From June 4 to Election Day, the tally was Obama, 626 stories, and McCain, 584. Obama was on the front page 176 times, McCain, 144 times; 41 stories featured both.'"